Mobile communication products continue to push the envelope in size and capabilities. Memory optimization of stored digital data is therefore vital in addressing the current and future demands of users of such products. Voice, video and multimedia signals are memory intensive. Compression schemes for such signals can become quite complex with resulting uncompressed signals that fall below acceptable standards in intelligibility or uncompressed data lengths that are still too large to provide a significant advantage in memory space savings. Thus, what is needed is a compression scheme for a stored digital signal that simply reduces the size of the stored digital signal while maintaining intelligibility and a significant savings in memory space in an uncompressed mode.